Headline
How Google’s Open Sourcing of VP8 Harms the Open Web
Much of the initial commentary on Google’s open sourcing of the VP8 codec it acquired in purchasing On2 has breathlessly, and uncritically, centered on the purported game-changing impact of the move. But unfortunately, these commentaries miss an essential point that Google has studiously avoided mentioning the need to standardize royalty free codecs (not just release [...]
MPEG Issues Resolution on Type-1 (Royalty-Free) Standardization
MPEG — Working Group 11 of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 — has issued a resolution seeking active participation in developing a Type-1 (royalty-free) video coding standard. “Given that there is a desire for using royalty free video coding technologies for some applications such as video distribution over the Internet, MPEG wishes to enquire of National [...]
Four Ways to Tell if the FCC’s Open Set Top Interface is On Track
It is gratifying to see the FCC Broadband Plan include an open set top recommendation (4.12), firmly grounded in the FCC’s continuing responsibility to implement section 629 of the 1996 Telco Act to “assure the commercial availability” of TV devices from retail and unaffiliated sources. And welcome words in the frank acknowledgment that over 14 [...]
Gateway To Nowhere: Standards-Bashing Won’t Fix Set Top Gridlock
Standards “would thwart, not advance, innovation” and “entail crippling delays” because they are “extremely time consuming, often divisive, and sometimes used by one faction to block the progress of another or to promote its own intellectual property portfolio”. It would be easy to dismiss comments like these in the Cable industry’s latest response to the [...]
DTG Group Challenges Semi-Open Stance of Project Canvas
Last August I questioned if the BBC-led hybrid DTV Project Canvas was “seduced by the cynical allure of a semi-open ‘standards-based open environment‘” . Many kudos to the DTG — the lead UK DTV standards group — who today released its tough-love “parallel process” criticism in the BBC Trust oversight consultation. To wit: “it is [...]
A Royalty-Free MPEG: It’s Time for ISO and ITU to Deliver
In late 2001, to much industry enthusiasm, H.264 and MPEG-4 AVC were launched as the world’s unifying codec family in a joint project between ITU and ISO/MPEG with the undertaking that the “JVT [Joint Video Team] will define a “baseline” profile. That profile should be royalty-free for all implementations.” The failure to deliver on this [...]
Don’t Quit – Evolve! ATSC Forum to Close Doors
Last week, Business News Americas broke the story that the ATSC Forum — the industry group that lobbies for the international adoption of the US ATSC digital TV standard of the Advanced Television Systems Committee — plans to close its doors at the end of September. Although the ATSC Forum’s closure has gotten little attention [...]
Patent Dumping For Democracy: Reconsidering America’s DTV Diplomacy
“More Democratic” … “It is a matter of social justice” So US ambassadors have lobbied South American governments since 2007 that “[t]he issue is whether the government will choose the [ATSC] digital television standard that is already providing the highest quality, lowest cost, and most democratic opportunities …” In recent months Peru, Argentina, and now [...]
“Conflict Through Consensus”: Europe’s Hybrid Broadbanders Paint on UK’s Project Canvas
A “Julius Stonian” observation: standards groups aren’t “consensus organizations”, they are political organizations. Winners declare their way the “consensus”, and changes in political context shift the “consensus”. So reflects calls in several slides at yesterday’s Hybrid Broadcast-Broadband (HBB) workshop to look deeper into Intellectual Property Rights and other control points in the new “broadcast+broadband” (aka [...]
The BRIC That Could: How Brazil Is Changing Your TV
Europe sneers at their technology. US’s DTV transition passed them by. BBC’s intelligentsia never noticed them. No consumer electronics industry to match Asia; neighbors don’t speak their language. So how did Brazil become a world leader in digital TV? And why the tip of the hat to Brazil DTV middleware leader TQTVD, to whom I [...]